Noises off

When I go out to the pond and marsh very early in the morning -- at or just after sunrise -- I find the Barn Swallows in action working along the vegetation and low across the marsh and pond edges. The Purple Martins, however, are still at or close to the colony. These very social birds first seem to send out occasional scouts to check out the situation. Acting initially as a group, they fan out over the immediate area around the colony, then over the marsh and, eventually, as things warm up and the larger insects get going, over a larger and larger area. The Purple Martin flying technique of fast flaps and a glide is quite different from the looping, darting and smooth flowing glides of the Barn Swallows. Occasionally these birds are joined by other swallows -- Tree, Bank and Rough-winged all have shown up -- or by a twittering Chimney Swift or two, almost always high overhead. Each of these species has its own distinctive flight style, often the best way to pick them out.

It has been the Green Heron and not the Willet that has been 'on guard' the past couple of mornings. While the Willet likes to post out in the open on the dead Red Cedar by the pond, the Green Heron sits in a pine or oak tree just back from the edge of the marsh and is well hidden beneath the canopy. I never would have noticed him at all if not for the strange and continuous series of soft 'gulps' that he emits and I which I did not at first correctly identify (I thought it was one of the cuckoos). The sound is hard to place and seems much further away than it actually is; as a result, I only recently connected with the heron. It seems to be a kind of territorial marker and perhaps a come-hither signal as well. The bird sits on a branch fairly high up and gulps away, each 'gulp' separated by at least 10-20 seconds of silence. Insofar as I have been able to watch it during the performance, there does not seem to be any special display although just the effect of the bird sitting on a branch is a display in itself; the staring yellow eye, thick yellow legs, strange muted plumage colors and long, straight, dagger-like bill gives it an almost prehistoric look.

The Green Heron gulps were not the only strange sounds of the morning. At the head of the marsh, there was a rather scary series of rattling or twittering noises coming from the thick forest of reeds covering that area. It was as if someone were trying to start a defective motor but it also had a slightly threatening quality. I worked my way around to the little wooden bridge across the muddy stream that feeds the marsh, sat down on the edge facing downstream where there was a view between the reeds, and waited patiently for something to show. Out of the reeds, down the muddy bank, and into the water came two cute little Raccoons, hardly more than babies, with full black masks but relatively stubby tails (I couldn't see tail markings or even much fur but the light was bad and the tails were wet and bedraggled). Perhaps mama was in the area; some books attribute the twitter to the mother as some sort of reassuring message to the offspring although I am quite certain that in this case one of the babies was making the sound. All I saw were the two young 'uns who paid me no mind as they snurfled around in the mud, stirring things up with their paws, before turning and heading downstream. If mama was in the area, she never showed.

Eric Salzman